Microsoft CEO and dancing queen Steve Ballmer has said the idea of using WebKit as the rendering engine within Internet Explorer was "interesting" and added "we may look at that" when questioned about Internet Explorer 8 development.

Ballmer was speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in Sydney this week when questions were fired at him by eager web developers. He also admitted the long delays of development between IE6 and IE7 during the Longhorn (Vista) cycle, "But I don't what to go there," he said.

Many companies are adopting WebKit for their browser experience. Nokia has enabled WebKit on their N series devices, Google uses an old version of WebKit in the Chrome browser and Apple uses WebKit for Safari and on the iPhone web browser.

If Microsoft adopted WebKit throughout IE then this could finally mean developers would have a standard for developing web pages. Microsoft could also replace the failed IE mobile browser in Windows Mobile with something that renders pages correctly.